“From what I’ve seen, schools are doing the right thing. “This is a really hard needle to thread – how to message this – because we know schools are working so hard to get kids caught up and are really putting so much effort into recovery strategies,” Lewis said. Programs such as intensive tutoring, summer school and longer days are making only a dent. Persistent attendance, staffing and mental health challenges – despite the influx of funding and an abundance of dedication of teachers on the ground – have in many ways made this past school year the hardest one yet since the pandemic. USA TODAY reporters also corroborated these trends in a recent project for which they spent a school year observing in elementary classrooms. The trends highlighted by NWEA echo those from other national tests. More: How to know how your kid is doing in school, and what to do if they are falling behind What this means for public schools But that return to learning and that catch-up didn’t happen quickly enough, and the result was a wobbly foundation that led to worsening gaps. That debt was mostly incurred during the extended periods of remote learning, “and I think we had this hope that all we have to do is get them back in the classroom – that once they start learning again, we’ll just fix this gap up real quick,” she said. Then, in 2021-22, students began progressing at rates seen before the pandemic, in some cases even exceeding those rates.īut schools this past year haven’t managed to repeat that upward trend. Why? “We can think of the impact of the pandemic as a compounding debt,” Lewis said. That was when schools saw the biggest gaps between students’ test scores and historical trends. NWEA’s test score data suggests that learning losses accumulated over the course of the 2020-21 school year, which resulted in a “low point” that spring. Kids in grades six through eight are among the furthest behind when compared with how students in that age group tended to score before COVID-19.This past school year, students of all races and ethnicities struggled to progress at a pre-pandemic pace, but the lags are especially pronounced among marginalized populations.Significant gaps persisted at the end of this past school year: The average student will need the equivalent of roughly four additional months of schooling to catch up in reading and 4½ months to catch up in math.Yet that pre-pandemic pace is necessary to close the gap between today's students and their predecessors.
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